Category: Accessibility

I guest edited a special issue of Communication Design Quarterly on “Reimagining Disability and Accessibility in Technical and Professional Communication” (volume 6, issue 4, December 2018). The issue includes an introduction and three articles on a range of cutting edge topics, including lip reading and interface design, subtitling and video accessibility across multiple languages, and cultivating virtuous course designers.

A note on pdf accessibility: The issue’s contributors carefully prepared their Word documents to be accessible when converted to PDFs by including alt text for figures and semantic tagging for headings. Access to these features was lost when the Word files were formatted to the journal’s specifications. As a workaround, I integrated authors’ alt text into their figure captions. After the issue was published, I took some time with the published version of the issue to 1) run Adobe’s accessibility wizard, 2) manually tag all headings and tables, 3) fix reading order in places, and 4) test with a screen reader. I believe this version is much more screen reader friendly, but please let me know if any of the content in this pdf is inaccessible (zdenek@udel.edu).

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The definitive captioning user’s guide

Winner: 2017 Best Book in Technical and Scientific Communication, Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC)

"There’s no book like this; plain and simple, it is one of the most original new books I’ve ever read." — Brenda Brueggemann, author of Deaf Subjects

About the Author

Dr. Sean Zdenek is associate professor of technical and professional writing at the University of Delaware. He has been keenly interested in closed captioning for over a decade and writing about it since 2009. Send him an email (zdenek@udel.edu) or follow him on Twitter (@seanzdenek).